


Prompt - Mara Jade, lightsabre

by Munnin



Series: The Star Wars Write Stuff challenge. [20]
Category: Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 01:29:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 481
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9856001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Munnin/pseuds/Munnin
Summary: Her sabres are her history





	

In her life, Mara had owned three sabres, each of them very different. Not just in their weight, balance, and grip, but in what she felt in them, through them. 

The first had been a gift from the Emperor on completion of her training. The day she became his Hand. She had trained with several – most of them trophies of one kind or another. Taken from slain Jedi or bought in as proof of a bounty. They meant nothing to her. They were tools. But like all tools, she trained and trained and trained until she could be utterly sure of them, with them. She needed to be as proficient with anything that came to hand as she was with her own blasters. But she knew she needed to be ruthlessly unattached too. At a moment’s notice, the mission might require her to abandon everything, including her equipment. 

So she treated it as such – a tool. A valuable and respected one but a tool nevertheless. When she lost it, years after Palatine’s death, she mourned it. Not as a symbol of her statue, but as a weight she had grown use to carrying and felt naked without. 

Years later, when she completed her training and became a Jedi, she entered the crystal cave and constructed her own sabre. She was surprised and a little saddened when the clear crystal took on the violet hue of the sabre the Emperor had given her, tinged with magenta. In her heart, it felt like a sign she had failed, that the Emperor’s darkness still held sway over her destiny. But what was done could not be undone. And the blade was hers this time. A part of her more than a tool.

The third was… complicated. It was a sabre of some age, one that had passed through many hands. 

It had belonged to Anakin Skywalker first – lost, stolen, traded, and returned over and over. At least until Mustafar. It had waited in the protective guardianship of Ben Kenobi until Anakin’s son was ready for it. In a city above the clouds it had been lost again, finding its way into the hands of the Emperor, and then to a cloned madman.

Who Mara slayed in battle, with Anakin blade in her hand. 

Luke had made a gift of it to her. A strange and wonderful gift, loaded with history and memory. 

She could never bring herself to use Anakin’s blade all the time. Perhaps for the very reason that she thought of it as Anakin’s blade, not her own. 

No sabre she owned was ever a part of her, not the way Luke’s was too him, or the way Anakin’s carried its history in the grooves of its handles. But she was glad to be a part of that history. 

Perhaps, in a perverse way, the sabres saw her as a tool too.


End file.
